Thankful for answers!Billy Elliot miners strike?
Basically Billy's father needed the money to send Billy to London. Although Billy's father and his brother Tony are very much against becoming "scabs" (that is those who cross the picket line and decide to work for the mining company despite the strike). Billy's father realizes that Billy's gift may be his son's chance to escape the mining life.
As he says:
Billy's father: "It's for wee Billy! He might be a f*****g genius, for all we know."
Tony replies that Billy is just a kid and that being a kid how could he rally know what he wants to do with his life and that does not warrant his father throwing away all that they are trying to achieve with the strike.
Because the people who go to work everyday and get paid are the reason why the minors are still out of work.... Billy's father was very anti crossing the picket line and the brother was telling the father not to make the sacrifice and not to go to work because not only will he be helping the people running the mine he will be betraying his friends ...... I studied this movie in school and this was my understanding of it hope it helped ...Billy Elliot miners strike?
As an addition to the above answer, I think Billy's dad decided to cross the picket line so that he could make money to help pay for Billy's dance school. The brother was trying to say he didn't think dance tuition was a good reason to scab because Billy was too young to know what he wanted to do with his life.
Billy's father decided to become what is termed "A Scab". It is a worker who defies a union ban on working at a site and crosses the line of picketing strikers to work for the lower wages and worse conditions which the strikers are fighting against having introduced. And the mass sackings they had planned as Thatcher oversaw the "Rationalisation" of the mining industry. She destroyed it in fact. And two generations of the British working classes along with it. Tradesmen and labourers. Old men and young were abandoned on the scap heap of "Economic Reform" . Without fair payment of Superannuation or Redundancy Benefits, without any plan to retrain or re-employ them as she changed the laws which governed industry and commerce right out from under them.
A scab is, in the minds and hearts of Unionists everywhere, the lowest form of life. It was the greatest shame one could bring upon a family's name. That they were being supported by a scab. "Don't do it to the boy" was a plea from the heart. That child would have been made a pariah. He would not have had a friend left in that town. They were fighting for their very survival as a community. As families. As people with any kind of a future at all outside the Welfare queue and sporadic casual labouring.
And they lost that battle. Decisively. It is to this day an incredibly emotive issue with those of us who were old enough to watch the systematic destruction of the way of life of the very people whose labour and lives had brought forth the mineral wealth from the ground that the multinational mining corporations grasped all to themselves. And yet too young to go into the streets and fight beside them. We saw it on the news. Our fathers and Uncles ridden down by horses. We heard the cracks of the battens fall upon their skulls and we shrank from the sight of Riot Squad boots smashing ribs and cheekbones as they fell.
Union men and women went over from Australia to join them on the picket lines. Unionists from all over the world did the same. For they knew as they watched the terrible swathe that the Police lines, armed with clubs with shields and mace, cut through those English miners, that the corporate lackeys at home would be after our workers soon enough.
They were battling to the last for what they had earned as their right generations before...to work all their lives with pride in the fact that they could support their families, no matter how hard was the graft they had to endure in order to do so.
And any man who had once stood beside them only to surrender and abandon that fight was reviled as a traitor.
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